“Their edgy campaign strategy created such a strong public backlash that Village Voice Media split from Backpage.com, and it helped fuel President Obama’s unprecedented human trafficking initiative. FitzGibbon Media’s team went well above beyond what was expected of them and truly became a leader in the campaign’s efforts.”
- Andrea PowellExecutive Director
Backpage.com is a general classifieds website, which until recently was owned by Village Voice Media, publisher of 13 alternative weeklies around the country, including The Village Voice in New York City. In addition to hosting ads of apartments for rent and toasters for sale, Backpage.com hosts an “adult” section where ads of children for sex have appeared. Since 2010 – when Craigslist.com took down the “adult services” section of its site, which sometimes also featured sex ads of minors – Backpage.com has served as the leading U.S. site for prostitution advertising, dominating 80% of the market and generating an estimated annual revenue of over $25 million from just its “adult” ads.
FitzGibbon Media’s mission was to design and execute a cutting-edge, multi-dimensional campaign to pressure Village Voice Media to shut down Backpage.com’s adult section. That was the narrow objective, but the larger objective was to curb child trafficking and exploitation in the U.S.
When Craigslist exited the adult services business, a number of its adult ads migrated to other sites such as Backpage.com, but the section’s closure also precipitated a 48 percent drop in the overall volume of prostitution ads online. A similar result was sought with the campaign against Backpage.com.
Just as FitzGibbon Media started its work on this project, a scathing letter to Backpage.com urging the company to shut down the adult section of its site had been sent by 46 of the nation’s attorneys general. The letter was significant, but without the support of a coordinated campaign to drive media attention to and build on the effort, its impact was weak.
FitzGibbon Media changed this. We devised a multi-pronged campaign strategy, which included earned and paid media, a targeted ad sanctions plan, and the involvement of political and cultural figures alike. We established a war room through which we ran our operations – compiling research, organizing field plans, monitoring the media in real time, and performing rapid response, acting swiftly and nimbly to pull in key players and organizations from our coalition and deploying targeted actions at critical moments.
Integral to the campaign’s success was the coalition we built – a diverse and robust group of actors from around the country, ranging from national clergy to leading nonprofits to elected officials to notable musicians.
Village Voice Media was not a household name when FitzGibbon Media began its work, but through the actions of our campaign we made it one, branding it as a disgraceful company that profited off the backs of trafficked children. We accomplished this using various tactics, including: